Thailand, England, Crabs, and Cricket

Thailand is a wonderful place to live. I often take it for granted, or fail to appreciate the good fortune that plonked me here. Every so often though, I'll have a small and often unexpected experience which will make me realise how thankful I am to be here.

For example, yesterday I was riding my motorbike on my way to get some dinner. Dusk had fallen, and I was driving through a nearby university as a shortcut. The roads were dimly lit, and I was mostly guided by the faint glow of my headlight. As I pulled round a bend I noticed a small black object in the road; slightly larger than a tennis ball. I couldn't make out what it was, but I was certain it was a live animal; I could just about make out some spindly legs and could see it inching across to the other side of the street. So I passed it before turning around for a closer inspection, my curiosity piqued. This was too slow and steady to be a rat, too fat to be a spider, and too short to be a lizard. 

It was a crab.




A crab! We were far from the nearest river, in a university, at night, but yes. Unmistakably, here was a crab heading steadily in a South-Easterly direction. Not giving a damn for the noise of my engine or the dim luminescence of the headlight, he plodded on completely unconcerned.

What I'm trying to say, in a roundabout kind of way, is that this is exactly why I love this country so much. This little crab represented the fact that life here regularly presents unexpected events (yes, occasionally for the worse, but more often for the better). Perhaps it's because I'm an outsider here, and therefore I'm still attuned to the novelty of these unexpected scenarios; things which might seem mundane to more experienced souls still fascinate me.

Such unpredictability never seemed to happen at home in England. Not that I wish to seem ungrateful, because there's also a stability and dependability in knowing pretty much precisely what the day will throw at you when you wake up in the morning. But for me, growing up and living in England was a stultifyingly mundane experience. Part of me thinks that's why England especially seems to constantly search for escape, in all manner of forms:

• We've produced some of the world's finest and most widely-read writers, poets, and playwrights; from Chaucer to today we've told stories that have entertained people and whisked them away to other worlds. I mean, is it entirely a coincidence that C.S Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and J.K. Rowling all came from England, and yet created fantastical versions of it to which their readers could escape? 
• We have an unhealthy obsession with sport in all its forms. Point of example: which other nation but England could have invented and loved the game of cricket, a 'game' spread over multiple days and incorporating meal breaks? It's because we don't particularly need excitement or glory; we need the distraction.
• Aside from only our Anglo-Saxon siblings in Germany (to whom I'll accede supremacy), we are perhaps one of the most enthusiastically alcohol based cultures in the world. Our consumption of beer and lager is truly stratospheric. We drink wine in quantities and qualities which would no doubt shame some of our Mediterranean neighbours. We invented scotch, and imbibed gin to such an extent that the government specifically had to make laws against it. Today, we march in droves to our city centers every weekend and quite joyously decimate all before us, leaving only blood stains and kebabs in our wake.

The point I'm trying to make is that in England, we need escapes such as these; life itself is humdrum, and the escapes are what make it worthwhile. I find that here in Thailand, life tends to provide ample entertainment and suspense all by itself; any escapes you might make are simply icing on a cake.
 
I'll always be grateful for ending up here, however fortuitously it may have come about.